GGuy was able to get a video of my progress on HDMario! Although it seems like the option "use as default tile regardless of pallette" got unchecked for some things like coins and boxes. A big thanks to GGuy for recording this for mehttp://youtu.be/UcTokxwSyEM

I had an idea, though I could completely understand if it would not be possible. Basically have HDNes detect the background color and effectively chroma key (green screen) it out, to be replaced with a much higher quality background image. Though with some colors, such as a black background, that appear on screen in places other than the background, I could see this as being unfeasible, thoughts mkwong?

It is possible. Instead of filling the screen with the background colour, I can paint the background image onto the screen before rendering other layers. Some games keep the background black and use transparent pixels in place of black, in this case the user can provide a replacement tile with solid black instead. However if the games also change the background colour and combine with transparent pixels to produce special effects (for example lightning), then the replacement tile will not work.

The only other big problem I can think of is how well the emulator can run with this feature. Uploading a large texture (1024 * 960 for 4x) to the graphic card is slow and uses a lot of memory. Besides that, the emulator needs to update the sprite and bg texture and vertices every frame and that is pretty slow too. I'm not sure how doing both will affect the speed.

The large texture for the backdrop would need to be changed rarely, only when the player enters a new map or when the emulator has to reload everything anyway (such as Alt-tab in and out causing loss of the DirectX surfaces). And a backdrop texture would often be blurry enough to be amenable to S3 texture compression. I'm just concerned about games that don't use color 0 for the background, such as Concentration Room in-game (whose color 0 is white but whose actual background is brown).

Was scripting support ever considered? That could provide a nice way to do music upgrades as well.

By scripting support I mean that a script file could be bundled with the HD pack of a game that could perform some operations based on some trigger conditions (execution breakpoints would be sufficient at least for some features like music and sfx triggering). Hard part would be of course figuring out what sort of API would be flexible enough. But if a scripting system was good enough, it could maybe used to smooth out some of the parts that can't be handled automatically.

Great new additions mkwong. I'm extremely happy to see the source has been released.

Tonight I started putting together a spreadsheet listing the compatibility of games thanks to the NesCartDB.I should have it done by tomorrow maybe. US carts only right now. Green = The game works. Red = It's a CHR RAM game or other issues and there will be problems. And finally Yellow means that there is an unsupported mapper and it will not load.Check it out here. HDNes Compatibility List

edit: I updated the list today. Problem games are now marked as red, CHR RAM are now blue, yellow is still unsupported mapper and green of course means it should work without any problems.

Last edited by GGuy on Wed Aug 27, 2014 9:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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